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“Irresistible is a fascinating and much needed exploration of one of the most troubling phenomena of modern times.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times bestsellers David and Goliath and Outliers “One of the most mesmerizing and important books I’ve read in quite some time. Alter brilliantly illuminates the new obsessions that are controlling our lives and offers the tools we need to rescue our businesses, our families, and our sanity.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction—an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans.
In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist.
By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the good—to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play—and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children. Adam Alter's previous book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave is available in paperback from Penguin.
“Irresistible is a fascinating and much needed exploration of one of the most troubling phenomena of modern times.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times bestsellers David and Goliath and Outliers “One of the most mesmerizing and important books I’ve read in quite some time. Alter brilliantly illuminates the new obsessions that are controlling our lives and offers the tools we need to rescue our businesses, our families, and our sanity.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction—an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans.
In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist.
By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the good—to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play—and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children. Adam Alter's previous book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave is available in paperback from Penguin.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book1.
The Rise of Behavioral Addiction
A couple of years ago, Kevin Holesh, an app developer, decided that he wasn’t spending enough time with his family. The culprit was technology, and his smartphone was the biggest offender. Holesh wanted to know how much time he was spending on his phone each day, so he designed an app called Moment. Moment tracked Holesh’s daily screen time, tallying how long he used his phone each day. I spent months trying to reach Holesh because he lives by his word. On the Momentwebsite, he writes that he may be slow to reply to email because he’s trying to spend less time online. Eventually, after my third attempt, Holesh replied with a polite apology and agreed to talk. “The app stops tracking when you’re just listening to music or making phone calls,” Holesh told me. “It starts up again when you’re looking at your screen—sending emails or browsing the web, for example.” Holesh was spending an hour and fifteen minutes a day glued to his screen, which seemed like a lot. Some of his friends had -similar concerns, but also had no idea how much time they lost to their phones. So Holesh shared the app. “I asked people to guess what their daily usage was and they were almost always 50 percent too low.”
I downloaded Moment several months ago. I guessed I was using my phone for an hour a day at the most, and picking it up perhaps ten times a day. I wasn’t proud of those numbers, but they sounded about right. After a month, Moment reported that I was using my phone for an average of three hours a day, and picking it up an average of forty times. I was stunned. I wasn’t playing games or surfing the web for hours, but somehow I managed to spend twenty hours a week staring at my phone.
I asked Holesh whether my numbers were typical. “Absolutely,” he said. “We have thousands of users, and their average usage time is just under three hours. They pick up their phones an average of thirty-nine times a day.” Holesh reminded me that these were the people who were concerned enough about their screen time to download a tracking app in the first place. There are millions of smartphone users who are oblivious or just don’t care enough to track their usage—and there’s a reasonable chance they’re spending even more than three hours on their phones each day.
Perhaps there was just a small clump of heavy users who spent all day, every day on their phones, dragging the average usage times higher. But Holesh shared the usage data of eight thousand Moment users to illustrate that wasn’t the case at all:
Most people spend between one and four hours on their phones each day—and many far longer. This isn’t a minority issue. If, as guidelines suggest, we should spend less than an hour on our phones each day, 88 percent of Holesh’s users were overusing. They were spending an average of a quarter of their waking lives on their phones—more time than any other daily activity, except sleeping. Each month almost one hundred hours was lost to checking email, texting, playing games, surfing the web, reading articles, checking bank balances, and so on. Over the average lifetime, that amounts to a staggering eleven years. On average they were also picking up their phones about three times an hour. This sort of overuse is so prevalent that researchers have coined the term “nomophobia” to describe the fear of being without mobile phone contact (an abbreviation of “no-mobile-phobia”).
Smartphones rob us of time, but even...
Reviews-
January 15, 2017 How interactive technologies facilitate newly debilitating addictions.Alter (Marketing/NYU Stern School of Business; Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, 2013) applies psychological insight and business acumen to his argument that compulsive usage of smartphones and social media is not peripheral but rather central to their engineering and lucrative, seductive qualities. "The environment and circumstance of the digital age are far more conducive to addiction than anything humans have experienced in our history," he writes. Although he speaks to game designers and other innovators, he focuses on the tangled psychology behind "behavioral addiction" and nascent efforts to treat it--despite a lack of consensus on whether or how to do so. Alter first explores how behavioral addiction resembles substance abuse, although it is more widespread and thus often free of moral opprobrium. This amplifies its risk to professionals, who underestimate their time spent engrossed by a constantly expanding menu of technologies. Video games have ensnared a wide demographic, as well. Consider the immersive appeal of World of Warcraft, and even simplistic games like Farmville captivated the unsuspecting, due to having "a new [gaming] rhythm that fits into...people's lives." Similar patterns can be seen in the rise of "smartwatches" and ubiquitous email: "The same technology that [now] drives people to over-exercise also binds them to the workplace twenty-four hours a day." The exhibitionistic nature of social-network apps enables a similarly insidious hidden hold on users, which Alter connects to Mark Zuckerberg's insight that "people are endlessly driven to compare themselves to other people." While such behavior might seem acceptable in adults, the author is alarmed by evidence that "screen time" is warping the mental and emotional development of younger generations. He bolsters such points with sociology and marketing studies, although more focus on the fast-changing technology industry itself would have firmed up his discussion. A clearly written account of a widespread social malady that is sure to gain further attention in coming years.
COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
February 1, 2017
In his new book, Alter (Drink Tank Pink) notes that although Steve Jobs was the CEO of technology giant Apple, he did not allow his own kids to use iPads. In fact, Jobs admitted to limiting how much technology his own children used. Alter includes this detail to emphasize how addictive digital devices can be--and that those responsible for them are aware of these habit-forming properties. This engaging and readable narrative lays out a succinct and pointed argument that technology can be addictive, bolstering the argument with relevant examples (for instance, World of Warcraft players devote hours upon end to the Internet game, sometimes forsaking everything else in their lives). Alter distinguishes among various types of addiction and discusses the difference between liking something and being dependent on it. Readers, particularly those who struggle with these issues or know someone who does, will find valuable information here. The author makes solid comparisons between compulsive behavior (e.g., gambling) and addictions (e.g., dependence on drugs), showing how our basic biology puts us all at risk. Readers will come away with a sense of how serious addiction can be and what we should do about it. VERDICT An excellent offering for those interested in technology, especially those grappling with the topic themselves.--Rebecca Hill, Zionsville, INHow to combat worry, guilt, & perfectionism; common-sense sleep advice; festive vegan favorites
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 1, 2016
The newest addiction? It's not to a substance but to a behavior, argues New York University professor Alter, author of the New York Times best-selling Drunk Tank Pink. Alter explains why we obsess over social media and our smartphones, what price we pay, and how we can disengage from the digital and smell the roses.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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